DEAN MUSGROVE — STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Turf Terminators, converted a turf lawn into a drought tolerant landscape, with no cost to the homeowner, at a home in Canoga Park. Two trucks of plants and wood chips will be placed on top of the drip irrigation system installed to lower water usage.

When Gov. Jerry Brown asked Californians to voluntarily conserve water by 20 percent, the response was an underwhelming savings of 9 percent.

But since the summer of 2014 when the governor issued his call, the drought worsened. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada reached near zero on April 1, Southern California reservoir levels plummeted from 2.7 million acre feet to 1.2 million in a year, while 400,000 acres of farmland in the Central Valley — the nation’s bread basket — went unplowed.

On May 5, for the first time in history, the state water board crafted mandatory conservation regulations requiring cities and water retailers save 8 percent to 36 percent by Feb. 13 or face $10,000 fines. With the nine-month emergency measure in effect since May 18, some say the days of apathy are over, replaced by a rabid conservation response from homeowners and business owners alike.

Adding to the response was the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which boosted its water conservation rebate fund on Tuesday by $350 million, bringing the total to $450 million. The combination of strict watering targets and an exploding cash-for-lawns rebate program has created a blind rush to reduce water usage that could change the look of Los Angeles forever.

At Earth Design Landscape in Redondo Beach, Chris Hayman’s phone rings three times as often today as compared with two months ago, he says. Hayman’s firm replaces grass with artificial turf.

“We have triple the amount of interest and double the amount of work,” he said Wednesday. “And it will probably increase. There are more people calling with a sense of urgency.”

In mid-May, Metropolitan, which serves 19 million Southern Californians water from Northern California and the Colorado River aqueducts, ran out of rebate money, after receiving $49 million in rebate reservations in one week. The agency paid out $88 million of the $100 million in its previous budget. The unprecedented additional $350 million means its program is back on, big time, with estimates it will serve 400,000 users in the next two years.

The hot market that gives homeowners $2 per square foot of lawn removed for up to 3,000 square feet (a $6,000 maximum pay-out), is a game-changer in many ways. Landscapers like Hayman have the good problem of keeping up with demand.

Earth Design has added drought-tolerant landscaping and drip-irrigation installation to its list of services for those that don’t want to go all artificial. The move could help his company install shrubs and bushes instead of grass in new homes, a drought-related standard adopted by the state Building Standards Commission Friday.

“But business is growing at an unhealthy rate. There are a lot of calls coming in and people want to get it done before the money runs out,” Hayman said. Many new businesses are popping up, slicing the relandscaping pie even further and driving down prices, he said.

Landscape urbanist Mia Lehrer, principal of Mia Lehrer + Associates in Los Angeles, says the rush to replace lawns these next nine months could change the look of L.A., mutating what she calls the city’s DNA.

“I’m worried about aesthetics. I’m worried about habitat. And I’m worried about heat. Through these new water restrictions, we need to love our trees more than anything, now,” Lehrer said this week.

Arborist William McKinley with the city of Glendale, said cities will cut water use because they don’t want to be fined. “With these watering restrictions, you will see a lot of tree deaths and diebacks,” he said.

Despite claims that artificial turf has improved from the 1970s Astro Turf days, Lehrer doesn’t recommend it. “It’s terrible and I’ll tell you why: It gets really hot. It creates a heat island effect, and it doesn’t allow for groundwater to percolate,” she said.

At a recent forum on how businesses are dealing with water-use restrictions put on by BizFed, a conglomerate of L.A.-area chambers of commerce and businesses, many in the audience said the “how to” conserve message was missing.

Some criticized the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for not providing websites explaining rebates in languages other than English and Spanish, such as Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese.

“Everyone is looking for the next big idea. Yet reaching out, educating people, it is not happening,” said Luis Vasquez with Maya Advertising and Communications, a social marketing agency.

LADWP pays $3.75 per square foot for removing turf. So far, the program has resulted in the replacement of 15 million square feet for about 370 million gallons of water savings.

For L.A. and many other Southern California cities, water conservation has been practiced since the last big drought of the 1990s. Many cities have helped customers install low-flow shower heads, low-flush toilets and water-wise appliances, reducing indoor water use.

“Our customers today are using the same amount of water as 45 years ago. That is a huge accomplishment,” said Penny Falcon, LADWP water conservation manager, who added the newest focus is reducing outdoor watering that amounts to between 50 percent and 70 percent of urban water use.

The goal of the state water board’s regulation is to save 1.2 million acre-feet of water in nine months, or 391 billion gallons, as much water as Lake Oroville, a major reservoir of the State Water Project currently at 48 percent of capacity.

Max Gomberg, climate change mitigation strategist with the state water board, put it this way: “The best way to make this work is for people to get the message, turn off the sprinklers, rip out the lawns.”

Steve Scauzillo covers environment and transportation for the Southern California News Group. He has won two journalist of the year awards from the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing on environmental issues. Steve studied biology/chemistry when attending East Meadow High School and Nassau College in New York (he actually loved botany!) and then majored in social ecology at UCI until switching to journalism. He also earned a master's degree in media from Cal State Fullerton. He has been an adjunct professor since 2005. Steve likes to take the train, subway and bicycle – sometimes all three – to assignments and the newsroom. He is married to Karen E. Klein, a former journalist with Los Angeles Daily News, L.A. Times, Bloomberg and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal and now vice president of content management for a bank. They have two grown sons, Andy and Matthew. They live in Pasadena. Steve recently watched all of “Star Trek” the remastered original season one on Amazon, so he has an inner nerd.

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